A front door for families, open since 1898.
Arden Shore Child and Family Services has worked with families in Lake County, Illinois since 1898: foster care, behavioral health and support, and the services that keep families together. The people who need its website are a parent in a hard week, a family thinking about fostering, and a donor who wants to help. We built it for all three, and made sure each of them can do what they came for from a phone.
“Strengthening families in Lake County since 1898.”
Three ways in, and help one tap away.
A family services agency has two audiences who arrive with nothing in common. One needs help and may be reading on a borrowed phone. The other wants to give: money, time, a spare room. Put both on one crowded homepage and each has to wade through the other.
So the site opens on a family and the line the agency has stood behind for over a century, then the three programs, foster care, behavioral health and support, and intact family preservation, each one tap from the top. The phone number sits in the header with a language selector beside it for families who read best in another language, and on a phone, Donate is the first thing in the bar.
Foster parents say it better than an agency can.
The hardest ask on the site is fostering, and no paragraph written by an agency makes it. People decide to foster because somebody like them already did, and told them what it was like.
So the homepage gives the ask to Tim and Natalie, Foster Parents of the Year in 2017, in their own words: four children under the age of four, hands full, and the line that closes it, everyone has something to give. It sits between the programs and the news, where a family weighing it up passes it on the way down the page.
Who the site is for.
Each of these can be checked on ardenshore.com.
- Three programs, one tap from the topFoster care, behavioral health and support, and intact family preservation, each with its own page.
- Donate first, on a phoneOn a small screen the bar at the top carries Donate before anything else, so a donor never has to look for it.
- A language selector in the headerEvery page can be read in the language a family reads best, from the top of the page, without hunting for a setting.
- The same promise since 1898Strengthening families in Lake County: the line on the first screen is the one the agency has kept for over a century.
- 1898the year Arden Shore began
- 3programs, one tap from the top
- 1stplace in the phone bar, for Donate
Two audiences, one front door.Help for the families who need it, and a clear way in for the people who want to give it.
Nobody buys a plan they haven't seen.
The free audit is a look at what you already have and what it is costing you, sent over with nothing to sit through. The plan is a conversation about where the business is and where you want it to get to, and it ends with a path written down rather than a quote. Or you call, and somebody who works on accounts picks up.